The mobile Internet based on a conventional mobile communications system is formed by a radio access network (RAN) and a mobile core network (CN). The RAN is responsible for providing wireless access for a user equipment (UE), and the CN provides a fixed Internet Protocol (IP) access point for the user equipment through mobility management. In this way, the user equipment accesses an external IP network through a mobile communications network, and accesses an application server (AS) through the external IP network. The user equipment usually provides a client function, and an application of the application server is provided by an application provider.
From the perspective of an application provider (an Internet Service Provider (ISP)), many small and medium ISPs provide an application service externally still in manners such as server hosting and bandwidth renting, where an ISP directly rents a server and a network bandwidth, or an ISP purchases a server and its supporting software and rents a network bandwidth to provide an application service externally.
From the perspective of a terminal user, a mobile Internet application is in great need of a storage service and a computing service in addition to an access service of a pipe. The storage service refers to storing user data, which includes formatted data such as a picture, a video, a data file, and an electronic mail. The computing service refers to providing office software (such as word processing software), Computer Aided Design (CAD)/Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM)/Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) software, a network game, and so on. Currently, a user-specific storage service and computing service are mainly provided by a user equipment, but are obviously limited by an extremely limited computing and storage capability of the user equipment such as a mobile phone.
A main problem of the mobile Internet based on a conventional mobile communications system lies in that the mobile communications system is fully pipelined. That is, only an IP access channel is provided, and application-related information, such as service properties of an application (Quality of Service (QoS) information such as a service type, a maximum rate, and an average rate), and signal source coding information of a service (such as a video streaming service), cannot be obtained directly from an application server. Therefore, an application and a pipe are separated, a RAN network element such as a base station provides only an access layer function, and inter-layer optimization of an application layer and a transport layer (Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)/User Datagram Protocol (UDP)) and an access layer is very difficult to implement.